C-reactive protein thin-film molecularly imprinted polymers formed using a micro-contact approach Original Research Article

A method for micro-contact imprinting CRP has been developed. An analogue, O-(-4-nitrophenylphosphoryl)choline, of the templates natural ligand, phosphorylcholine, was used as the functional monomer. A series of non-imprinted polymers made without template, but with varying cross-linking agents, were made in order to produce a control polymer with minimal non-specific recognition. The affinity of the imprinted polymers for the competing proteins, lysozyme and albumin, was examined. Their respective relative affinities, with 1.04 μg/cm2 of the template protein bound to the imprinted surface as reference, were CRP/albumin = 4.0 and CRP/lysozyme = 346. Measurement of the film thickness showed it to be approximately 10 μm. A competitive binding experiment showed the CRP imprinted material to retain good selectivity for its template when jointly incubated with human serum albumin and CRP. Using the same method we were able to form a micro-contact imprint of human serum albumin which demonstrated relatively good recognition for its own template 2.66 μg/cm2 compared with 0.27 μg/cm2 for CRP.